In my world as an investor, I find entrepreneurs who can’t let go of any task.  For various self-declared reasons, they alone can complete a given assignment.  Or even worse, they micro manage someone else’s work.  Sadly, this personality type frequently delegates a task to a subordinate only to quickly take it back.

Innovators who behave in this manner rarely achieve greatness.  I see this unfortunate behavior among entrepreneurs from time to time.  For some reason, they don’t understand that one person cannot competently plan, prepare, organize and execute everything that needs to be accomplished within an organization.

* Zuckerberg helps push Harvard alumni to second place

* Most grads get venture funding for software firms

* Berkely grads break mold with energy, industrial firms

By Sarah McBride

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Stanford University alumni with entrepreneurial streaks may be particularly well placed to pay off their $41,250 tuition bills, according to a new report on venture funding.

Companies run by Stanford alumni raised $4.1 billion across more than 200 financings in the five years from 2007 to 2011, according to CB Insights, a consultancy.

That compares to $3.8 billion by Harvard alumni, whose rank was boosted by former student Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, CB Insights said. University of California at Berkeley alumni raised $1.3 billion; New York University and University of Pennsylvania alumni raised $1.2 billion each; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni raised $1 billion.

An overemphasis on the "hard" side of management, a carryover from the industrial age, can at best achieve a linear increase in performance. But a focus on the soft, non-linear side can lead to exponential growth.

There is a continuum in management between "hard" and "soft." The "hard" is the management that makes plans, sets up structures and monitors performance. The "soft" is the people friendly management based on emotions. The classic, modern dichotomy was shown by the switch of John Sculley in 1983 from the "hard," corporate world of Pepsi to Apple, which was based on ‘soft’ management, and then, as Apple developed and investment bankers became involved and the company grew bigger, friendship went out of the window, management became tough and aggressive and everything was about the bottom line.

SALT LAKE CITY — For years, researchers have scoured the Internet for evidence of how bloggers and social media affect consumer decisions like choosing what movie to see or which book to buy. Never has there been a similar look at how the blogosphere affects larger financial decisions—particularly new venture financing decisions in which every choice is worth millions of dollars—until now.

A new study published in the journal Information Systems Research and led by Rohit Aggarwal, an Operations and Information Systems professor at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, finds that bloggers can have a massive effect on both the funding amount and valuations of startups. More interestingly, Aggarwal’s findings have something to say about whether one should pursue 10 posts from popular blogs versus 1,000 posts from not so popular blogs. Guess what?

Theirs was the immortal battle: a fierce tyrant battling a defender armed with three lethal horns and protected by a bony frill around its neck. Yet the violent fight between Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops is hardly the stuff of Hollywood hype. Tyrannosaurus bite marks are well known on the fossil bones of Triceratops but, so far, such fossils have always been studied in an isolated manner.

In a departure from this precedent, work presented last week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, reports on an examination of numerous bite-scarred Triceratops bones and a theory of how Tyrannosaurus fed.

You had a light bulb moment. You jotted down the idea. You did some research. You wrote a business plan. You’ve got skill. You’ve got passion. You’ve quit your job! You’re an entrepreneur. All of this sounds great, but so many entrepreneurs are caught off guard when they are not greeted with immediate entry into the market, clients lining up for services or customers screaming for their new product. In the early stages of start-up, the sexiness of being an entrepreneur is quite often shaded with the reality that building a successful business takes time, money and barrels of effort.

Reality soon hits for first time entrepreneurs as their infant business become stagnate, ideas are shelved and the job applications come out. Rather than allow statistics, naysayers or your inner devil’s advocate get the best of you, consider these five tips for staying positive while in start-up mode.

Pre-incubators are the last word in the startup hipster glossary, and the latest entry in this field is from Startup Weekend.

Startup Weekend, which hosts weekend-long business hackathons, has joined forces with Startup America, TechStars, and other such entities to launch Startup Weekend Next, a program for new would-be entrepreneurs who need a bit of advice, polish, and hand-holding.

As we suggested last week, it seems easier than ever to lock down angel funding in D.C. Our angel population appears to be on an upswing. More and more, old money and new is finding its way into startups, for as many reasons as there are startups. It’s unclear exactly what combination of market opportunity, economic optimism, bullheadedness and ego is driving the most recent flow of angel dollars. Whatever the case, new check-writers are showing up daily.

A new NASA image based on satellite data shows that the extent of Arctic sea ice, as of September 2012, has hit a new record minimum, compared with the average minimum extent for the past 30 years.

The new minimum, set on Sept. 16, is almost 300,000 square miles (777,000 square kilometers) less than the previous record minimum set in September 2007 (1.61 million square miles or 4.17 million square kilometers).

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The Rhode Island Foundation has launched the second Rhode Island Innovation Fellowship, which will award up to $300,000 each to two individuals who have ‘‘outside the box’’ ideas for bettering the state.

Foundation CEO Neil Steinberg says he hopes applicants will use their enthusiasm, creativity and spirit to come up with innovative ideas for improving Rhode Island. The funding, over a three-year period, comes with virtually no strings attached.

With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens.

 The goal: to see if illiterate kids with no previous exposure to written words can learn how to read all by themselves, by experimenting with the tablet and its preloaded alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs.

The U.S. presidential election is less than two weeks away, and immigration hasn’t figured very prominently in the last-mile campaigning of U.S. President Barack Obama and his rival, Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Instead, issues like jobs, the economy, and relations with China have dominated.

India hasn’t come up either, apart from in a few attack ads on outsourcing aimed at Mr. Romney.

But with a new book that looks at data on entrepreneurship and immigration in the U.S., Vivek Wadhwa, an adviser to students and faculty at Duke University’s engineering management program, hopes to return high-skilled visa policy to the agenda. In “The Immigrant Exodus,” Mr. Wadhwa argues that Americans should be very concerned by the increasing difficulties that foreign information technology workers and scientists face in getting green cards.

We will regularly update this state-by-state report on Hurricane Sandy as it barrels up the East Coast, threatening to create havoc for tens of millions of people. Jon Hurdle from Philadelphia; Brian Stelter from Rehoboth Beach, Del.; and Thomas Kaplan from Cape May, N.J., contributed to this report.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Purdue University will host 28 veterans beginning Thursday (Oct.  25) for the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities.

Purdue's Krannert School of Management is one of eight schools at universities around the country that teach the bootcamp, which is aimed at helping post-9/11 veterans with disabilities start their own businesses.

The veterans will be in the Indianapolis area Thursday through Sunday and then will be on Purdue's West Lafayette campus for the next week.

Created at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management in 2007, EBV teaches participants principles of entrepreneurship and small-business management. All expenses are paid.

The Thank You Letter is quickly becoming a lost art, or at least it gets lost in rules of etiquette.  Be assured, though, that it is never wrong or inappropriate to send a thank-you.  Handwritten notes let the giver know that not only is his gift appreciated, but the thought behind it is as well.  In a corporate setting, it is even more essential that you write a thank you note for gifts received.  It will help curry favor with the giver, of course, but it is also a thoughtful gesture.  How do you write a good corporate gift thank you letter?

A corporate gift thank you note or letter has to be both formal and personal.  It can be a hard balance to achieve; you don’t want to be overly familiar with the giver like you would be with a close friend or family member, but neither do you want to be cold and distant, which can make the giver think the gift was not really appreciated or was expected.  Everything, from your word choice to your letterhead, helps to create the right feel for your letter.

When it comes to venture capital, Keet van Zyl is as savvy as they come. He’s worked for companies such as Procter & Gamble, Investec Bank and HBD Venture Capital, and helped set up private equity funds in the Southern African region for a US-based investor. He also co-founded fund manager, Knife Capital as well as the business Angel investment group, AngelHub, which invests in startups with high-growth potential. Based on his experience as a partner and board member of various investments, van Zyl shared some of his thoughts on what it takes to build a successful startup.

Whether you’re a male or female entrepreneur, starting a company feels a lot like giving birth. You went through the planning, the pain, the emotional roller coaster of fear, excitement and anxiety and, months later, you came out of it stronger than ever.

Fast forward a year or two past the launch. Your startup is a teenager, nearly ready to step into adulthood. It has full-time employees, a 1-800 number, maybe even a blog. There’s just one problem: You’re still cutting the crusts off your startup’s sandwiches. That is, you’re still fielding phone calls from clients, working hands-on with the product, probably even writing the blog yourself. You’re babying your startup by working in the business instead of on the business.

There are typically two ways companies unintentionally discourage innovation: preventing employee growth and paying too much attention to the highest paid person in the room. Here's how to promote creativity instead.

What do turtles have to do with innovation? Not much, we thought, until we ran across a retail manager at a big box store in San Diego during the course of our research and clinical work for Judgment on the Front Line. That manager pulled us aside to explain that most employees--particularly those at the bottom of the hierarchy who serviced customers--were treated like turtles at many companies.

What is the right balance between intelligence and social connectivity? From an innovation perspective, this difference is very significant. In fact, it can mean the difference between success and failure.

In the past decade, the word “friend” became a verb, the word “like” became a noun, and “tweet” became more than a birdsong. Social technology--originally designed for communication between college co-eds--has since brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia. Thomas Payne would have been proud.

See all those people signing up for the 10K charity run/walk in your hometown this weekend? Those folks in your Facebook photo album, decked out with colorful T-shirts and uplifting messages about fighting some disease?

You could easily have written off many of these nonprofit fundraisers a few years ago as well-intended, but ultimately ineffective, efforts for coming up with cures. The real action, you could have argued, was only happening in the investor-driven, profit-motivated world of biotech and pharmaceutical companies.